I’m spending a few weeks at the University of Arizona, courtesy of the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. I’m working on my thought experiments project, before presenting a paper on caricatures of science, at a conference in Tucson in early December. I’m loving it here. The sky is blue; the weather is gorgeous; the air is clean. And there are fascinating people around. I’ve had great conversations with philosophers, experimental economists, and others.
Posted by Adrian Blau on November 21, 2022
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2022/11/21/a-stint-at-the-university-of-arizona/
Today is the first day of a two-day conference which Joanne Paul and I are running ‘at’ the British Academy (i.e. online), on Quentin Skinner’s ‘Meaning and Understanding’ After 50 years: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.
Skinner is one of the world’s leading historians of political thought, and someone who has influenced me throughout my career – starting with his brilliant undergraduate lectures, which I described here.
His essay on ‘Meaning and Understanding’ was a seminal essay that still bears close scrutiny today. Its key argument is that to understand historical texts, you need to read them historically. Skinner criticises many errors and ‘mythologies’ in the study of historical texts.
The conference features papers on many issues, including applying his ideas to ancient Greece and Rome; to philosophical reconstruction; to music theory; to Indian, Islamic and Chinese contexts; to rhetoric and ideological analysis; to digital humanities, quantitative text analysis and sociolinguistics; and to racism in political thought (my paper).
Registration is free, and you can come to as much or as little of the conference as you like.
Posted by Adrian Blau on July 7, 2021
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2021/07/07/quentin-skinner-conference-at-the-british-academy/
My paper ‘Meanings and Understandings in the History of Ideas’ is now online (Open Access – the PDF is free to download!) at the Journal of the Philosophy of History.
This paper gives a much broader account of meaning and understanding than is traditional among philosophers of language and intellectual historians. I offer a philosophical basis for these ideas and show their value in studying the history of political thought and history of philosophy.
This is the sister paper to my article ‘Extended Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, published last year in History and Theory (see my blogpost here).
Both articles take their inspiration from Quentin Skinner’s classic essay ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, also published in History and Theory.
Skinner implies that there is one idea of meaning and one idea of understanding; I discuss others. Here’s the summary of my paper:
This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, for example to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity.
Interestingly – and I use that term rather loosely! – most of this paper actually started out in the ‘Extended Meaning’ paper. Only about 10% of the final version of the ‘Extended Meaning’ paper was in the original draft. The rest of it was gradually replaced, until I realised I had enough for a second paper!
This second paper provides a philosophy-of-language basis for the ‘Extended Meaning’ paper. I seek to correct Paul Grice’s wrong turn in the philosophy of language in the 1950s. Grice mostly depicted ‘natural meaning’ as involving natural phenomena (e.g. ‘smoke means fire’). I follow Wayne Davis in depicting this as ‘evidential meaning’, but whereas Davis relates it to signs, I relate it to empirical consequences. To say that P means Q, in the sense of evidential meaning, is to say that if P happens, Q happens.
Seeing evidential meaning in terms of empirical consequences opens the door to what I call ‘extended meaning’, which I relate to logical consequences. To say that P means Q, in the sense of extended meaning, is to say that P logically implies Q. For example, if I say that Paris is the capital of Germany, but Paris is not actually the capital of Germany, this means that I am wrong.
Yet extended meaning is largely overlooked in traditional accounts of meaning and understanding, even though we often use this language in practice. The idea is absent, or only partially or vaguely present, in the typologies of Quentin Skinner, Leo Strauss, E.D. Hirsch (whose famous distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ gets heavily criticised in the paper), A.P. Martinich, and Mark Bevir. I also compare extended meaning to similar ideas implied or discussed by John Plamenatz, Knud Haakonssen, Gad Prudovsky, and Morton White. Plus I give lots of examples; some people will enjoy playing the game where they try to guess what my loosely anonymised examples refer to!
Overall, extended meaning is a hugely important kind of meaning in intellectual history – which generates a hugely important kind of understanding, as I discuss in both papers.
Extended meaning thus deserves to be taken seriously by all scholars working on history of political thought, history of philosophy, and intellectual history. It’s an idea we all know implicitly, but the failure to name and theorise it has been a problem.
Posted by Adrian Blau on June 17, 2020
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2020/06/17/meanings-and-understandings-in-the-history-of-ideas/
I’ve just finished my half of a new undergraduate course on Race and Racism in Political Theory. I’ve covered ‘Western’ thinkers; in the second half of the course, my colleague Humeira Iqtidar will be covering ‘non-Western’ thinkers.
I’ve found the material tremendously stimulating, and I learned a great deal, both from the literature and from my students. To my shame, I haven’t addressed these issues until a couple of years ago: I have definitely been guilty of what Robert Bernasconi calls the “sanitising” of Western philosophy, by sidestepping racism or by treating it as not central to (some) philosophers.
(And incidentally, if your first instinct – as mine was – is to reply that race and racism were not central to these philosophers, please read the Bernasconi article linked to above and see if you still agree. Very few articles have changed the way I think as much as Bernasconi’s has.)
Here are the thinkers I covered:
I’ll change several things next year. In particular, the Jefferson seminar will probably be replaced with something on different types of racism.
The picture for this blogpost marks the theme of my half of the module – the racism underlying much Western political theory. It’s a fantastic painting by Titus Kaphar, called Behind the Myth of Benevolence. As regards my teaching on this course, the painting represents Behind the Rhetoric of Liberty and Equality For All.
Posted by Adrian Blau on February 19, 2020
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2020/02/19/race-and-racism-in-political-theory/
In 1969, Quentin Skinner wrote a seminal essay on ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’. Fifty years later, in the same journal (History and Theory), I have published an article expanding his account.
Skinner, writing as a historian, focused on ‘intended meaning’ – what authors meant by what they wrote. I focus on ‘extended meaning’ – the implications of what authors wrote, whether intended or not.
Intended meaning has dominated our methodological literature, and philosophy of language more generally; many historians of political thought seem to see it as the only kind of meaning and understanding. But extended meaning, and the kind of understanding it furnishes, is not only a worthy goal of research but even helps scholars whose main focus is intended meaning.
So, these two types of meaning and understanding are not alternatives. Just as political theorists and philosophers must address intended meaning, so too historians must address extended meaning.
My paper also gives a qualified defence of anachronisms. These are controversial for historians, but I show that they are implicit in any historical claim about an author’s originality.
This paper thus challenges the view, still dominant in our methodological literature, that historians are doing something fundamentally different to political theorists and philosophers. (I make similar arguments in several places, including my 2019 chapter on Sharon Lloyd’s book on Hobbes interpretations, my 2015 article ‘History of Political Thought as Detective-Work’, and a paper on textual context, just published in History of European Ideas, that I will write about very soon on this blog!)
Here is the abstract:
Many historians focus primarily on authors’ “intended meanings.” Yet all textual interpreters, including historians, need a second kind of meaning. I call this idea “extended meaning,” a new name for an old idea: “P means Q” is the same as “P logically implies Q.” Extended and intended meaning involve different kinds of understanding: even if we grasp exactly what authors meant, we miss something important if we overlook their errors, for example. Crucially, extended and intended meaning are not alternatives: just as some parts of texts cannot be understood without historical analysis, so too some parts of texts cannot be understood without philosophical analysis. Indeed, some historians are adept at using extended meanings to recover intended meanings. But the failure to make this explicit has led many historians to undervalue philosophical analysis. This article thus applies the idea of extended meaning to three practical questions: whether we can deviate from authors’ intended meanings, whether we can use anachronisms, and how we can use extended meanings to recover intended meanings. The idea of extended meaning thus strengthens our theoretical foundations and offers valuable practical tools.
It’s a coincidence that this paper was published fifty years after Skinner’s essay: I first drafted the paper ten years ago, and 90% of it has changed in the meantime. But I’m absolutely thrilled that it’s been published in the same journal.
Posted by Adrian Blau on September 11, 2019
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/extended-meaning-and-understanding-in-the-history-of-ideas/
I’m thrilled that the European Journal of Political Theory has accepted my constructive critique of the great German philosopher and social theorist, Jürgen Habermas. The final paper is now online.
I challenge Habermas’s caricatures of means-ends rationality (the ability to choose good means to ends), and argue that properly understood, it changes how we think of communicative rationality, his mind-blowingly important idea about the rationality of genuine communication.
Habermas never explains what he means when he says that means-ends rationality is ‘egocentric’, and none of five plausible understandings of egocentrism fit the claim that means-ends rationality is egocentric.
I suggest that sincerity and autonomy, not non-egocentrism, are the key distinguishing features of communicative rationality.
Communicative rationality thus overlaps with means-ends rationality – completely against what Habermas and most of his followers say.
Moreover, Habermas and his followers actually need means-ends rationality. I exemplify this by showing the use of means-ends rationality in deliberative democracy, to work out how to implement it, and even in Habermas’s ‘discourse ethics’, using the example of gay marriage.
My article thus challenges decades of what Habermas and critical theorists have written on means-ends and communicative rationality.
But I stay broadly true to – and hopefully improve – Habermas’s account of rationality.
The article was a very long time in the making. I started thinking about this in about 2006, and drafted a very different version of this paper in 2011. If I remember rightly, it got rejected by 5 or 6 journals without a single reviewer from those journals saying that the article should be accepted! Then I significantly rewrote it, and went back up the journal chain to a high-ranking journal, where an angry reviewer angrily told me that I needed to read Uwe Steinhoff’s angry book about Habermas. 😛
I submitted another version to the European Journal of Political Theory, where I got a big ‘revise and resubmit’ (i.e. I had to make certain changes, then the revised article would be sent back to the reviewers to see if they thought it was now good enough). It took me two years to find the time to address this, and even then I still needed a few months to work out what to do. Thanks to my perceptive referees, the final version is much better at justifying my position and explaining why it matters.
So, I’ve amassed many debts over this time, not only to the people I specifically acknowledge in the article, but also to my anonymous referees – and not just the excellent ones chosen by the European Journal of Political Theory, but also the anonymous referees of previous versions of the paper who helped me gradually get this paper into publishable shape.
Posted by Adrian Blau on August 23, 2019
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2019/08/23/my-critique-of-habermas-on-rationality/
My article “Cognitive Corruption and Deliberative Democracy” has now been published in the journal Social Philosophy and Policy, in an issue dedicated to corruption.
I may be wrong, but I believe it’s the first thing to defend deliberative democracy with the argument that citizens “take off their party hats”. In other words, if we have a random cross-section of (say) 200 or so citizens, debating the pros and cons of a policy, they are more likely to try to argue the merits of the case, rather than being driven by what their party would like, what would put opposing parties in a difficult position, and so on.
Picture (unrelated): Sándor Molnár, “Dragon Slayer” (1966), in the Hungarian National Gallery (from my recent trip to Budapest)
When he read this paper, Mike Munger – a classical liberal/libertarian opposed to deliberative democracy – said “I don’t like this paper, because it makes me think positively about deliberative democracy”. Praise indeed!
The article also redefines corruption, not as “misuse of public office for private gain”, the standard definition, but “neglect of public duty for non-public gain” – a broader idea which also includes many historical understandings which the standard definition excludes. (“Office” comes from the Latin officium, meaning duty.)
The article is partly historical, looking at ideas of what I call “cognitive corruption” (corruption of judgement) in the work of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bentham and Mill. They have some really juicy insights.
A key idea is that many commitments – including commitments to parties – can corrupt our impartiality. Parties are probably inevitable in modern democracies, at least for the time being, but in some respects they seriously weaken democracy and rationality.
Here’s eight key ideas from the paper:
1) cognitive corruption—the corruption of judgment;
2) auto-corruption, and impartiality potentially being corrupted by having a
stake in something;
3) corruption not as misuse of public office for private gain, but neglect of public
duty for non-public gain;
4) corruption for party gain;
5) a system of party corruption;
6) the arbitrariness of party policy positions, with decisions often made on inauthentic
grounds rather than being driven by the force of the better argument;
7) deliberative democracy as a non-hierarchical method of making decisions
where citizens remove their party hats; and
8) the importance of getting the right dispositions, not just the right institutions/
procedures.
The paper is in the Winter 2018 issue of Social Philosophy and Policy, but was only published recently.
Posted by Adrian Blau on July 16, 2019
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2019/07/16/corruption-of-and-by-democracy/
Cambridge University Press has just published my chapter on the need to interpret Thomas Hobbes historically and philosophically, in an important new book edited by Sharon Lloyd. I contrast two prominent interpreters of Hobbes: Jean Hampton, a philosopher, and Quentin Skinner, a historian. I show, surprisingly, that Skinner actually uses philosophical analysis better than Hampton to recover what Hobbes thought.
In short, both historical and philosophical analysis are needed. Yet the methodological literature in history of political thought (and history of philosophy) typically sees history and philosophy as essentially separate.
Unfortunately, the publishers managed to mangle my point by changing the title of my chapter at the last minute, without my permission. The title had been:
Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes: Historical and Philosophical
But someone at Cambridge University Press unilaterally decided to change the italics:
Methodologies of Interpreting Hobbes: Historical and Philosophical
This makes it sound as if there are two methodologies for interpreting Hobbes, when I was arguing that there is one, which should combine historical and philosophical thinking.
I complained two months ago but nothing has yet happened. It’s too late to change the printed book, but I’ve asked for the website and PDF to be corrected.
Posted by Adrian Blau on June 13, 2019
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/combining-history-and-philosophy/
Readers who know my aversion to Leo Strauss (see here) may be surprised by my surprisingly positive review of Devin Stauffer’s new book on Hobbes, on Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (link).
Stauffer, an Associate Professor at UT Austin, argues that Hobbes was trying to subvert his readers’ religious attachments – but not by saying so directly. Rather, the argument is esoteric: Hobbes’s real views can only be grasped if we read between the lines. For example, some of Hobbes’s ‘defences’ of religious views were so bad that they would subtly draw attention to the opposite view.
I’m not convinced, and my review raises five challenges to Stauffer’s interpretation. Still, I don’t reject Stauffer’s book: it is definitely plausible. Indeed, it’s the best Straussian interpretation I’ve seen – way better than anything Strauss wrote.
Underpinning my critique is is the need to interpret texts ‘scientifically’, by comparing alternative interpretations, looking at what fits and doesn’t fit one’s interpretation, standing outside of the interpretation and asking what it would take to be right, and so on. I discuss those ideas elsewhere on my blog, in relation to my paper ‘History of Political Thought as Detective-Work’, originally called ‘History of Political Thought as a Social Science’, here, and in exploring the place of uncertainty in history of political thought, here. I’m actually most explicit about the scientific nature of textual interpretation in a chapter I wrote called ‘The Irrelevance of (Straussian) Hermeneutics’. Please email me if you want a copy, at Adrian.Blau -[at]- kcl.ac.uk.
Posted by Adrian Blau on May 28, 2019
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2019/05/28/a-surprisingly-positive-review-of-a-straussian-book-on-hobbes/
I’m in the US for five weeks, giving the following papers:
• Columbia, Wed Oct 3 – ‘How (not) to use history of political thought for contemporary purposes’.
• Stanford, Fri Oct 12 – ‘The logic of inference of thought experiments in political philosophy’.
• Berkeley, Tue Oct 16 – ‘Hobbes’s failed political science’.
• Association for Political Theory conference, Bryn Mawr/Haverford, Sat Oct 20 – ‘Post-truth politics and the rise of bullshit’.
• Arizona, Thu Oct 25 – ‘The logic of inference of thought experiments in political philosophy’. (I’m also teaching a class on ‘Corruption and conceptual analysis’ on Mon Oct 22.)
• University of Texas at Austin, Fri Nov 2 – ‘The logic of inference of thought experiments in political philosophy’.
Posted by Adrian Blau on October 2, 2018
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/a-five-week-us-tour/
I’m very excited to be teaching history of political thought again this year! This time we’re covering Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, the Federalists/Anti-Federalists, and Bentham, with half-hour mini-lectures on corruption, gender, methods of interpretation, parties, public opinion, religion, and tyranny/totalitarianism. In the first half of term there’s also practical exercises e.g. how to deal with ambiguity in texts (applied to Machiavelli), and how to break down and analyse arguments philosophically (applied to Hobbes). We do other exercises in seminars, e.g. how to use historical evidence (applied to Rousseau), how to apply modern conceptual frameworks (applied to the Federalists/Anti-Federalists), and how to draw contemporary insights (applied to Bentham). It’s a wide-ranging module which I love teaching. This year my TAs will be Caroline Ashcroft (Cambridge) and Max Skjönsberg (LSE), who are both giving two of the mini-lectures, with Sarah Wilford (KCL) returning to give two other mini-lectures.
Here’s a two-minute video of me summarising the module:
Posted by Adrian Blau on September 29, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/09/29/history-of-political-thought-teaching-this-year/
I’ll be giving a controversial paper at two conferences: the American Political Science Association (Sept 1-4, in Philadelphia), and the European Consortium on Political Research (Sept 7-10, in Prague).
My paper draws parallels between thought experiments in political theory and philosophy, and controlled experiments/comparisons in the natural and social sciences. Some of these parallels have been noticed before, by people like Frances Kamm, Tamar Gendler, and (in the book on political theory methods that I’m editing) Kimberley Brownlee and Zofia Stemplowska. But no one I’m aware of has taken advantage of the powerful toolkit that social and natural scientists have developed. I thus use ideas like internal and external validity, controlled comparison, omitted variable bias, interaction effects, spurious correlations, testable implications, and parsimony.
This helps us see better how to do thought experiments, and how much we can learn from them.
Of course, some readers will be more interested in my broader claims about the relationship between political theory and science. But note that I don’t equate the two: there are parallels, but also important differences. By contrast, I do argue elsewhere that some textual interpretation is essentially scientific: we often ask empirical questions (like what Locke meant by ‘rights’ or why he wrote what he wrote), and scientific ideas are the best tools we have yet developed for answering such questions. (See here for the most explicit version of the argument, and here for the most details account of what a scientific approach to textual intepretation involves.)
This isn’t really what’s going on in political theory thought experiments – which are, furthermore, only one part of political theory, and a part that many authors don’t use. Nonetheless, this casts some light on what some philosophers of science mean when they discuss ‘naturalism’, defined here as philosophy and science being ‘continuous’.
Although I’ve been thinking about and teaching some of these ideas for many years, my paper was written quite quickly, and needs more work. In particular, I cannot yet say how widespread the problems I discuss are.
The paper is here. Any comments and criticisms would be much appreciated!
Posted by Adrian Blau on August 25, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/thought-experiments-scientific-parallels/
On the European Hobbes Society website, I’ve posted a list of my top 10 Hobbes articles. It’s open for comments there if you want to suggest your own list, or challenge any of my suggestions!
Posted by Adrian Blau on July 14, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/07/14/my-top-10-hobbes-articles/
I’ve now sent the manuscript of Methods in Analytical Political Theory to Cambridge University Press.
Each chapter gives ‘how-to’ advice, explaining how to use the method or approach being discussed.
The lineup is as follows:
The book should be out in 2017.
Posted by Adrian Blau on April 18, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/methods-in-analytical-political-theory-sent-to-cup/
On Tuesday March 22 I’ll be talking to the History of Political Thought Society at the New College of the Humanities, on ‘History, Political Theory and Philosophy: Different Questions, Different Answers?’
I’ll be arguing that while historians, political theorists and philosophers often end up asking different questions, many of their tools are the same. Historians have in effect won the battle to get political theorists and philosophers to think historically and consult historical research, but political theorists and philosophers need to do more to convince historians to think philosophically and consult philosophical research. This can be a valuable means even to primarily historical ends!
Time: 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm. 
Location: Drawing Room, New College of the Humanities, 19 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3HH. (N.B. Someone will need to let you in, so if possible please arrive by 6.30.)
RSVP: joanne.paul@nchlondon.ac.uk
Posted by Adrian Blau on March 16, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/talk-at-nch-history-political-theory-and-philosophy-different-questions-different-answers/
From Wednesday I will be spending a few days as a Visiting Professor at Charles University in Prague, the oldest university in the Czech Republic and one of the oldest in Europe.
I’m working hard while I’m there:
Wed March 16: lecture on ‘Passions, Corruption and the Maintenance of Institutions:
From Machiavelli to Today’.
Thu March 17: seminar on ‘How (Not) To Use History of Political Thought/Philosophy for Contemporary Purposes’.
Fri March 18: Hobbes seminar. Part 1: ‘Interpreting Hobbes Philosophically and Historically: Different Questions, Different Answers?’ Part 2: discussion of my chapter on ‘Reason, Deliberation and The Passions’ in the just-published Oxford Handbook of Hobbes.
Sat March 19: ‘Academic Essays’ workshop for students and staff.
(Details here.)
I will also see two Mozart operas (Don Giovanni, and Cosi fan tutte), in the Prague Estates Theatre – where Don Giovanni was premiered in 1787.
Let me know below if you have any suggestions about where I should go or what I should do/eat/drink. I’ll be back in Prague again in September for the ECPR conference so can tick more items off the list then!
Posted by Adrian Blau on March 15, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/03/15/visiting-professor-at-charles-university-in-prague/
Keith Dowding and I are organising at least seven panels on Methods in Political Theory at the ECPR General Conference in Prague, 7-10 September 2016. Details are below.
The deadline for paper abstract submission is 15 February 2016.
In order to apply you need a MyECPR account (http://ecpr.eu/Login.aspx). This is free if your university is an ECPR member institution. Then upload a paper abstract. Feel free to contact me (Adrian.Blau@kcl.ac.uk) or Keith Dowding (keith.dowding@anu.edu.au) if you have questions about your abstract or anything else.
FURTHER INFORMATION:
(more…)
Posted by Adrian Blau on January 6, 2016
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/call-for-papers-methods-in-political-theory-at-ecpr-general-conference-prague-7-10-sept-2016/
16 of us wrote reviews of Arthur Melzer’s important book about esoteric writing, Philosophy Between the Lines, in the June and October issues of Perspectives on Political Science. Melzer has now written a 10,000-word response. Unfortunately, he did not engage with most of the reviews. His wording is curious:
In the space allotted me for rejoinder, it would clearly not be possible to reply to each of the essays individually, and it would be unbearably tedious if it were. Most of the essays, at any rate, stand in no particular need of reply.
I’m not sure about any of those three claims!
For what it’s worth, my review made the following points:
Posted by Adrian Blau on November 19, 2015
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/disappointing-non-response-by-arthur-melzer-to-my-and-other-peoples-criticisms/
UPDATE: This article has now been published, in History of European Ideas 41:8 (2015), pp. 1178-94.
My paper ‘History of Political Thought as Detective-Work’ has now been accepted by History of European Ideas. The paper uses a detective analogy (following Collingwood and others) to give practical principles for textual interpreters on how to draw plausible inferences from incomplete, ambiguous evidence about what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote.
I used a different analogy in the versions of this paper I gave at York, Reading, Durham, KCL and Kent in 2010-2012, but that analogy was too controversial to get published, and I only make it explicit in a forthcoming chapter in Winfried Schröder, ed., Reading Between The Lines (de Gruyter, forthcoming). But those who read between the lines of the current paper will see what I’m really arguing. For what it’s worth, the different analogy was also present in the original version of my ‘Anti-Strauss’ article, but the referees rightly made me take it out. Still, it’s there implicitly. My critique of Strauss has always been a vehicle for far more important ideas.
Here is the abstract of my History of European Ideas paper:
This paper offers practical guidance for empirical interpretation in the history of political thought, especially uncovering what authors meant and why they wrote what they wrote. I thus seek to fill a small but significant hole in our rather abstract methodological literature. To counter this abstraction, I draw not only on methodological theorising but also on actual practice – and on detective-work, a fruitful analogy. The detective analogy seeks to capture the intuition that we can potentially find right answers but must handle fragmentary evidence that different people can plausibly read in different ways. Placing the focus on evidence, and on combining different types of evidence, suggests that orthodox categories like ‘contextualist’ and ‘Marxist’ too often accentuate differences between scholars. This paper instead highlights core principles that unite us – ideas that underpin good textual interpretation across all ‘schools of thought’.
Posted by Adrian Blau on October 29, 2015
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/csi-cambridge/
I did my second standup comedy routine in July, on Jeremy Bentham – here is a short clip.
I particularly enjoyed this performance because Bentham’s body is kept at UCL, where the set was filmed; there’s a cheery rivalry between UCL and my university, KCL.
Here is a link to my first set, about Benjamin Franklin, from May 2015.
The next of these ‘History Showoff’ standup comedy nights is on 7 October 2015 at the Star of Kings pub in King’s Cross; I shall be enjoying this as a member of the audience only! See here for more details and to book tickets, which cost £6.60; profits go to charity.
Posted by Adrian Blau on August 26, 2015
https://adrianblau.wordpress.com/2015/08/26/a-bit-of-bentham-comedy/
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